Intermediate Platform Engineer

Learning & Growth

Actively develops depth in platform engineering by studying cloud-native patterns, Kubernetes internals, and reliability engineering approaches beyond the immediate needs of current work.

Engages with the broader platform and SRE community through conferences, publications, and open source, bringing relevant insights back to the team.

Reflects on their own technical decisions after delivery, considering what worked well, what they would do differently, and what they would share with others.

Identifies the next level of technical challenge they need to take on and actively pursues it with their TTL or manager.

Develops knowledge of adjacent domains such as security engineering, data engineering, and software delivery to collaborate more effectively across team boundaries.

Seeks out feedback on their platform design decisions from senior engineers, not just confirmation that their approach is acceptable.

Delivery

Delivers moderately complex platform work independently, managing their own scope, estimating accurately, and flagging risk early.

Maintains delivery momentum while juggling mentoring responsibilities, managing their time deliberately to do both well.

Breaks down large infrastructure changes into reviewable increments and delivers them progressively with appropriate rollback plans.

Contributes meaningfully to sprint planning by providing well-reasoned estimates with explicit assumptions and flagging dependencies.

Drives changes to completion including post-deployment verification, monitoring setup, and runbook updates, not just code merged.

Identifies and manages delivery risk proactively, flagging to TTL when scope or risk is larger than initially understood.

Quality & Craft

Sets a visible quality standard for the team through their own work so others can understand what good platform engineering looks like.

Writes IaC that is modular, reusable, and well-documented so that others can safely extend and maintain it.

Applies consistent testing practices to infrastructure changes including plan reviews, integration tests, and pre-production validation.

Performs thorough self-review before requesting code review, checking security implications, cost impact, and operational burden.

Designs for operability, ensuring every component they build can be monitored, debugged, and recovered by an engineer unfamiliar with it.

Identifies systemic quality issues in the platform codebase and proposes structured improvements rather than one-off fixes.

Communication

Communicates platform decisions clearly, explaining not just what was decided but why, and what alternatives were considered.

Writes thorough PR descriptions for infrastructure changes that include context, risk assessment, and rollback procedures.

Provides code review feedback that is specific, actionable, and educational, helping junior engineers understand the reasoning.

Surfaces reliability risks and platform concerns to senior engineers and the TTL with clear evidence and impact assessment.

Communicates effectively with product engineering teams, translating platform concepts into terms relevant to their concerns.

Documents platform capabilities, operational procedures, and architectural decisions in accessible places for future engineers.

Collaboration

Builds strong working relationships with product engineering teams, understanding their workflow needs and pain points.

Collaborates actively with security engineering to ensure platform components meet security and compliance requirements.

Contributes substantively to technical discussions, sharing well-reasoned opinions while remaining genuinely open to better ideas.

Invests time in mentoring junior engineers as a core part of the role, not an optional extra.

Works across team boundaries on shared infrastructure components, building trust and establishing clear ownership.

Facilitates knowledge sharing through runbook writing, internal guides, and capturing learnings from incidents.

Ownership

Takes full ownership of the platform components assigned to them, understanding them deeply and maintaining them proactively.

Responds to platform incidents with urgency, investigating, communicating, and resolving with minimal escalation needed.

Advocates for the health of the platform by raising concerns about technical debt, fragile infrastructure, and reliability risks before they become incidents.

Follows through completely on delivery commitments including monitoring setup, documentation, and knowledge transfer.

Maintains awareness of the cost implications of their infrastructure decisions and actively looks for optimisation opportunities.

Acknowledges and learns openly from technical mistakes, sharing root cause analysis with the wider team where appropriate.

Technical Foundation

Demonstrates strong Terraform and Kubernetes capability applied consistently in production-quality platform work.

Designs infrastructure with appropriate rigour, applying cloud-native patterns with clear documented reasoning and security considerations.

Builds and operates CI/CD pipelines that are reliable, fast, and maintainable by engineering teams without platform team intervention.

Implements observability solutions that provide genuine confidence in platform reliability and make debugging straightforward.

Understands cloud networking and security at sufficient depth to design secure, well-connected infrastructure.

Maintains awareness of the broader platform architecture and how their work fits within it and serves engineering teams.

Keeps up with evolution in the team's tooling and cloud platform services, evaluating new capabilities and adopting them where they add clear value.

[ Name ] Intermediate Platform Engineer – Growth Tracker

IMPE · SFIA 3-4 · raganmcgill.co.uk

Strengths to recognise

Development focus areas

Overall assessment & agreed actions